Many hospitals and nursing homes are required by State, Federal, and International laws to establish and document emergency evacuation procedures. In the case of a fire emergency, these institutions are required, among other things, to document a method for evacuating all patients from their rooms to a safe area. One critical aspect of the evacuation process is effective communication among staff as to which rooms have been evacuated. State, Federal, and in some cases, International regulations leave the method of communication up to each institution's administration. As such, several techniques have been developed. These include, but are not limited to, the use of pillow cases left on the floor outside the evacuated room, orange tags placed on a hook on the outside of the door of the evacuated room, and the use of a chalk mark on the outside of the door of the evacuated room. Each of these communication systems has weaknesses and does not provide the most efficient method of communicating the evacuation status of the affected room. These methods put patients, staff, and rescue personnel at unnecessary risk. In general, the shortcomings of each of these devices and other similar devices not mentioned here, are the following:    1. Require retrieval from some storage location—The current methods utilize items that are not located at the point of use. Therefore they have to be retrieved at the time of the emergency. This takes valuable time away from the evacuation process.    2. Items utilized could be misplaced—The items utilized in the current methods are not affixed to the point of use possibly resulting in being misplaced and not available at the time of the emergency.    3. Application of the method is clumsy and/or difficult—Getting the pillowcase off of the pillow is clumsy and placing a sign on a hook can be difficult in a tense situation thus again wasting valuable time.    3. These methods and devices may not hold up to either the heat from a fire (in the case of the chalk or the sign) or the traffic of the evacuation process (in the case of a pillow case on the floor). In either case, the indicator is rendered inadequate resulting in no communication to other evacuation personnel.    4. These methods and devices would be difficult to see in conditions of poor visibility (i.e. smoke or dim to no light).    5. These devices do not provide an efficient means of communicating the evacuation status of each room to which they are employed at a location other than at the location (room) on which they are being used. They cannot communicate to a remote location or remote devices where the evacuation status of rooms can be strategically used to manage a mass evacuation of a facility. As a result, rescue personnel and/or staff must return to and/or enter a dangerous area to evaluate the area for evacuation status of the occupants.
The device proposed in this application provides a consistent, efficient method for indicating the evacuation status of the room to which it is attached. Once triggered, it will indicate that the room to which it is attached has been evacuated in the following ways:
A) Physical, visual indication hanging on, or near, a door to a particular room displaying an evacuation symbol common to those in the building
B) Either one or both of the following, wireless or via low voltage hard wired communication signal to a central control station and/or hand held devices.
It will improve the evacuation process of institutions where it is used and will save lives of patients, staff, and rescue personnel by eliminating duplicate searches of rooms previously evacuated.